How things work, where information goes missing, what gets overlooked, and what happens when you look a little closer.
Melanie E. Magdalena · Austin, TX
The throughline
At twenty, I published a spatial analysis of Maya settlements in Belize — mapping where people built, what moved between them, and what the gaps revealed about how a society organized itself around scarce resources.
Since then, I've built data systems for nonprofits and universities, redesigned security patrol routes around what a floor plan left out, and trained in a food bank warehouse to understand how food actually moves through the building and out to the community.
Very different jobs. But I keep getting interested in the same sort of thing: what's happening, what's missing, and what you can learn by looking closer.
2012
Maya spatial analysis published, age 20
2014–22
Digital systems architecture nonprofit & web
2023–24
Security & route design
2024 →
Inventory, logistics & supply chain ongoing
What I tend to notice
01
The information nobody recorded. The relationship nobody mapped. The detail that doesn't fit the explanation.
02
The spreadsheet says one thing. The warehouse floor says another. The plan meets the actual situation and something interesting happens.
03
Records worth keeping, knowledge worth preserving, and information that needs to make sense to someone who wasn't there when it was created.
Selected work
The Workshop →Attention to Connection
How do you help fellows, partners, and alumni find their way through the same organization without flattening their different needs? I redesigned the digital platform around the relationships between its people, programs, and publications.
Read the case study →
Attention to Place
Seven cameras, three recording decks, and a live room that wouldn't sit still. My first time on Blackmagic hardware wasn't my first time thinking about how to capture a story across multiple sources.
Read the case study →
Attention to Place · 2012
At twenty, I published a spatial analysis of Maya settlements in Belize—mapping where people built, what moved between them, and what the patterns could tell us about how people lived.
Read the paper ↗
Boundaries Uncertainty Connection
I'm looking at what inventory systems capture, what they leave out, and what happens when the spreadsheet meets the warehouse floor.
Explore the Workshop →
I completed the Central Texas Food Bank's Warehouse Operations Program, learning how food moves through a warehouse: from receiving and inventory to shipping and delivery. I'd spent years building digital systems around information. I wanted to understand the physical operation those systems are supposed to represent.
Writing
I'm working through inventory and supply-chain problems, looking at what the models capture, what they leave out, and what institutional theory can tell us about the difference.
In progress
Reading
The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control
Katherine Morgan Schafler
Volunteering
Planting baby trees, spring pruning, spreading mulch, and (always) picking up (more) trash. Next up: It's My Park Day!
Austin Parks Foundation · Keep Austin Beautiful · Waterloo Greenway